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A piece of basic research made it into even mainstream news sites yesterday: the finding that the peptide thymosin ß4 can prime adult cardiac epithelium to produce new muscle cells after a heart attack. Getting the heart to regenerate itself after injury is a goal of the British Heart Foundation’s campaign to ‘Mend Broken Hearts’, which we’ve mentioned a couple of times here at Naturally Selected.

This is truly an amazing and exciting piece of research, and opens up the real possibility of finding drugs that might give people a much better life following a heart attack, by helping the heart to help itself. The zebrafish has this ability, and why it was lost and how to get it back is a thorny scientific problem. The BBC article gets the tone about right, not promising any miracle cures, and spelling out the caveats–such as making sure it works in humans. (It even links to the paper in Nature, which is a bonus.)

The lead scientist, Paul Riley, is one of our F1000 Members, and I made a little film about his lab a couple of months ago. He did very well not to let slip about the paper to me, especially considering that the manuscript at the time had been with Nature for an entire year! Yesterday at the press conference I talked to a couple of his lab members that I didn’t get to interview in March. Here’s Sveva Bollini, who did the stem cell characterization and Karina Dubé, a grad student who helped her out:

I also cornered Peter Weissberg, the BHF’s Medical Director, who forcefully makes the point that effective new medical treatments come from a framework, a foundation of basic research:

You can watch Paul talking about the findings and their implications at The Scientist website, but I then asked him the length of time it took to get the paper published. Here, he candidly describes how this paper had a rough time through the review process, but in the end the process significantly improved the paper:

[UPDATE: Read the F1000 evaluation by Nadia Rosenthal here.]